I thought the whole point of the competition (that had cities hysterically renaming themselves "Google") was that residents were going to get broadband service for free, or at least at a sharp discount compared to what the robber barron Baby Bells and CATV operators were offering.

...And people who want much slower but conventional broadband can get it for free if they pay a $300 connection fee.

You only pay if you want gigabit speeds. And it's the same price as a 50/25 FiOS connection, so that seems pretty fair to me. Of course, even my 50/25 FiOS is far faster than what most servers seem able to deliver, so it's unlikely to make much difference unless you're planning to host a reasonably heavy server...

it's unlikely to make much difference unless you're planning to host a reasonably heavy server

For bandwidth, yes, but there's a big advantage in having such a surplus: you don't have to do aggressive QOS to prevent latency spikes and loss. Wanna game while someone else watches Netflix? No problem.

With more and more content being aimed at internet delivery, 75 bucks a month is not unreasonable for a small business that needs a lot of feeds, (bars) or families that do a lot on line. Small web service companies can develop and host for their customers. I can see a lot of people going in for this even at home, but especially for small business that does anything on line.

You like so many others are confusing QoS with traffic shaping. QoS is good - done right. If done improperly, its bad. Traffic shaping, on the other hand, is generally what causes complaints - frequently baselessly.

QoS, for example, ensures my SSH packets are delivered on a timely basis and that it doesn't wund up waiting behind the packets of my neighbor's torrents. In theory, my neighbor still gets his bandwidth, but his packet latency will be slightly higher; which is still perfectly acceptable for that type of traffic. That's a good thing. QoS is all about QUALITY of transport. Traffic shaping, on the other hand, is all about restricting some for the benefit of others. That's different.

QoS, for example, ensures my SSH packets are delivered on a timely basis and that it doesn't wund up waiting behind the packets of my neighbor's torrents. In theory, my neighbor still gets his bandwidth, but his packet latency will be slightly higher; which is still perfectly acceptable for that type of traffic.

This is a valid correction, but the GP's point holds regardless. Given sufficient bandwidth, QoS is as unnecessary as traffic shaping. Your SSH packet -- or, more importantly, my VOIP packet -- may end up waiting behind the neighbor's torrent packet, but since his 1500-byte torrent packet only blocks ours for 15 microseconds, who cares?

No, I mean QoS, as in prioritizing which packets get to go first to fulfill certain delivery guarantees. Traffic shaping is a QoS technique - without help from your ISP you have to manage the receive buffer with RED or similar.

My 25/25 FIOS has problems when my son uses Steam and gobbles up all 25mbits to download a patch while I'm playing a game. Saturation is possible if the source has the bandwidth to match your own. QoS is definitely not a bad thing.

"Isn't this pretty much a universal condition for residential internet?"

sadly yes, the only way I can envision that landscape changing quickly would be if google would step up and aspire to be something better than the current 'universal residential internet' service. If those other 'universal' providers were asked about that clause, I'd guess they might plausibly lie through their teeth explaining that shared bandwidth concerns are their reason for not TOS allowing things like a quake3 or alienarena or ol

It makes no sense for a company to offer this to residential clients. They can charge a premium for a business plan which offers official support for servers, and generally grants an unfiltered connection with a static IP. Why cut yourself out of that mark up?

They can charge a premium for a business plan which offers official support for servers, and generally grants an unfiltered connection with a static IP. Why cut yourself out of that mark up?

This is Google. When did Google ever enter a market with the intention to do something similar to the rest of the industry? Is Google even offering a business plan at a higher price? If they are not, then the argument does not apply to Google. And they already stated this is an experiment just to see what can develop as

Sadly, Google is unlikely to ever think out of the box again. They are now hostage to giant institutional investors who absolutely insist that Google not do anything they can't understand. That means they can't do anything that hasn't already been done before. Unless they are willing to take a major hit to their stock price (and there's no sign they have that willingness), Google will never innovate again. It's not allowed.

Strange, I'd have thought that offering an fiber-based alternative infrastructure to a pretty good sized city would have qualified as pretty damn innovative. Who else is trying that?

Google has been publicly traded for many years now, and as such "hostage" to outside investors. In that time they've started this project, the self-driving cars, Google Glass, and a bunch of other stuff that "hasn't been done before", certainly not to the scale that Google is attempting.

The self-driving car is laughable. Google is not going to become an auto manufacturer. Google is not going to become a technology provider to an existing auto manufacturer. The existing manufacturers suffer from Not Invented Here Syndrome worse than almost any other industry. They're the very definition of hidebound, and it's no surprise, as they've been exposed to the kind attentions of the aforementioned institutional investors for generations now. I give Google's project another year before they pull the plug, and that's optimistic.

Google's objective isn't to become an auto-manufacturer or to become a supplier to them. Their objective isn't to directly make money on this at all.

Their objective is to free up the billions of eyeball-hours spent on driving so they can be used for something else....

Isn't this pretty much a universal condition for residential internet?

Its also about as clear a violation of the FCC Open Internet rules as one could imagine, since it is very much not an application- or use-agnostic rule, and that it prohibits the use of lawful applications, content, and services over a fixed broadband connection.

Its not surprising that the incumbents -- whose rules predate the FCC Report and Order and who are challenging the FCC's authority to issue it -- retain such rules. It is a bit mo

Would your grandmother/parents/other non-techie friends pay $9/month for internet if it was a 3 year agreement paid up front from a fairly reputable (as in not likely going under) company?

My grandfather paid $15/month for dial up, I'll wager Google is giving these $300 customers more then 56Kbps even if they throttle them..I pay over $50 a month for FiOS and I don't even get over 30 Mbps.. If i wanted gigabit speeds I could not even request it from FiOS... and their plans hit $300/month without hitting *half* this service... I'd say the pricing is great

I think right now servers & computers will be the bottleneck... Unless you're writing your download to a SSD or RAID array... you barely can handle a 1 Gbps write (quick math, 1Gbps = ~125MB/s)

I think right now servers & computers will be the bottleneck... Unless you're writing your download to a SSD or RAID array... you barely can handle a 1 Gbps write (quick math, 1Gbps = ~125MB/s)

Haven't benchmarked a system recently, have you? SATA 1 is capable of up to 1.5GBit/s, SATA 2 3GBit/s, and SATA 3 6GBit/s. There *are* drives out there which can sustain this.. some consumer class SATA3 SSD's can sustain 550 MB/s write speed.

Quite aside from that, modern computers are being built with signficantly more RAM than earlier systems, too. My desktop was under $1000 and it's got 16GB of memory. Who cares what speed the hard drive is when you can download a large file to memory and commit it to the

You might want to check with FIOS. I was pulling my bill online yesterday and was hit with an ad for FIOS Quantum. Speeds up to 300/65 in some places. The best I can do is 75/35, but it's a hell of an upgrade from 35/35. My bill goes up $20 a month, so I'm paying $59/mo for 75/35 (part of a bundle of course). ANyway, if you haven't logged into your VZ account lately you might want to check. I didn't get any emails or hear a peep about it until I logged in.

I thought the whole point of the competition (that had cities hysterically renaming themselves "Google") was that residents were going to get broadband service for free, or at least at a sharp discount compared to what the robber barron Baby Bells and CATV operators were offering.

5Mbs/1Mbs asymmetric access at a one-time $300 connection fee (lump-sum or paid as $25/mo over 12 months) and $0/month service is a sharp discount compared to similar low-end broadband offerings, but the actual pitch wasn't to get broadband "free" or "cheaper" than existing broadband, it was gigabit/s broadband at prices that were competitive with the prices at which existing (much slower) broadband services were being offered. Which Google's pricing for its symmetric gigabit/s tiers (being fairly comparable in price to what other providers are offering for plans offering "up to" speeds in the tens of megabits/s) certainly would seem to be.

If there were a half dozen people in my house, all plugged in, it might be worth it. But I'm paying 1/3 as much and even with all three computers streaming radio and TV and torrents, it's still plenty fast for me.

Since it's election season, I posed a question about broadband availability to the 10 candidates for our local state representative. Only 3 responded, and... Outside of Google lighting a fire, my parents are literally going to die of old age before they get broadband.

Your parents CHOSE to live in a rural area...... presumably because they like it there. Well with choices come consequences and tradeoffs. They get a beautiful area to live, but no highspeed. Oh well. When *I* wanted internet I moved away from the Amish country & closer to Baltimore and got it. Therefore if I were them I would move out of the valley to a hill that can receive free TV, satellite, cellular service. Or better yet: Into the city where there's plenty of services for elders (like almost-free bus & train transport).

In the meantime there's always dialup. It costs me $7/month through isp.netscape.com and works with websites, streaming radio, and even youtube (download first, then watch). They can use that if they voluntarily choose to remain where they are.

I come from a rural area... people that wanted cable actual moved to the hills on either side of the valley where it was even more rural (and almost impossible to leave for half the winter), but they got satellite signal damnit. They also went through quite a few dishes thanks to lightning.

How very bootstrappy and independent of you. Is there really no grey area between "expecting others to solve your problem" and wanting some reasonable investment in the community?

I come from a rural area in AZ. The telephone cooperative, which is responsive to the wants/needs of its customers/shareholders, takes a very long view of their needs in its planning, and recognizes the future economic value that can come from having infrastructure in place. As a result, they pulled fiber past my parent's ranch

Oh and in your other post you said we are 35th in speeds. False. According to speedtest.net the U.S. and E.U. as equal in speeds (~12 Mbit/s average). They are tied for 3rd place behind Korea and Japan, but ahead of Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Australia, India, and China.

In other words both the Americans and Europeans are first-world civilizations with first-world rankings (near the top).

>>>First, only the people paying for the fast speeds are the ones using it to verify,

I used it on both my slow-speed 56k dialup and 750k DSL so your presumption is false. And rerunning the test simply stores additional data for each person. Anyway I have yet to find a more-reliable source than speedtest, since it measures actual connections from billions of tests. No other organization has done that.

I used it on both my slow-speed 56k dialup and 750k DSL so your presumption is false.

The plural of anecdote is not data. It makes sense that disproportionally fewer people with slow Internet connections use speedtest.net. Just because you, a single person, do not conform to that profile, that does not mean that the common-sense argument is invalid.

$15/month is a lot smaller than $75/month. Maybe that's why we haven't seen more fiber installations... people not willing to pay the cost. Sooooo how did Google get permission to install fiber w/o getting sued by KC's local monopolies (Verizon and Comcast)??

Depends on what that $300 "Conventional" Broadband Internet gets you. If it's like the lowest tier of DSL your $15/month you're looking at what? 180 per year vs 300 for Life. I just wish I knew what "Conventional" Broadband Internet would get me.

Yeah $300 flat rate would be better. I've had high-speed for 4 years now so google's plan would have cost me ~$6/month. I suspect this plan is a loss-leader for google, similar to how Xbox worked for Microsoft. It's a way to establish themselves in a new market.

It's mostly Time Warner they are competing with here.. hey, and guess who's channels are missing from the initial line up of offerings?

Consider the cheapest option, though... $300 upfront (or $25/month for 1 year - hey, free financing!) for 7 years of 5down/1up. That comes out to $3/month for better than DSL speeds (at least last I checked, which has been a while...)

The hole point of Google's experiment is to show people that 20MB, 30MB or even 50MB is not enough, we all grew complacent with our current slow internet speeds and, given the option, would chose slow internet, Google is trying to break that. What we have now is a race to the bottom where entrepreneurs don't create services which require fast internet because no-one has a fast internet, and no-one buys fast internet because there are no sites/services to use it. Google's idea is to foster a new generation of web services where bandwidth is simply not an issue.

What they are doing is the internet equivalent of the Apolo program, and you are saying "I don't want a rocket, why don't they build cars?". I don't even live in the USA and I don't have ANY hope that Google will open an ISP here, but I'm happy and hope they succeed because their work will show the whole world that we can/should have more.

$75/mo just for internet seems steep for most people. And very few who really need 1G can't afford it. It's not like the relatively piddle amount of money it's saving them is going to induce a massive wave of job creation.

Now if it were 100Mb for $25 that would be more news worthy in my opinion.

What it's doing for the world is introducing a competitor to the ISP oligopoly that actually has the muscle to not be stomped on. When people start seeing how cheap it actually is to provide broadband (after all, the $300 is to cover the infrastructure installation - after that it's FREE), it might light a fire under AT&T, Comcast, etc. to actually start playing by the rules of capitalism again.

Having worked in a NOC before, I can tell you that it's not free at any point. Things break... a lot. Fiber makes things a lot more reliable. But they still break. What happens when a fire truck knocks down your fiber trunk? You're going to charge the City $500k for the repair? So then they have to lay off a few firemen... and now you have a public relations nightmare? No way... so you just suck it up and pay for it yourself.You know how many Fiber trunks we lost because some un-insured drunk drove their ca

I applaud Googles attempt here, but they can't charge nothing, it's just not going to work.

As long as they can get enough customers buying the Gb or the Gb+TV, those will fund keeping the bits flowing. With the infrastructure in place, the cost to provide 5 Mb connections to the rest is basically nil.

You are confusing capitalism with competition. These are orthogonal. You can have one without the other. Capitalism is about investment. That can exist even for monopolies. What we gain by having Google enter the marketplace for FTTH is competition. Capitalism is already here.

Sorry, but the quoted clause was from the terms of service, which left itself so vague as to use the wording "improper use" (by whose metric of 'proper'?). The TOS next to that clause, gives a link to the aforementioned section which lays out what defines 'bad use'. So that _is a rule written into the Google-Fiber contracts_ _already_ (as if there were any customers already bound by the TOS).

They seem to have a 8 tuner main box and that should be fine for most home use but for some Business use they may need to have more let's say down the road they get NFL ticket that by it self + rezone can take up all 8. Even with just NBA LP and NHL CI can take up 8 or more. Hotels 8 is way to small.

Will they use the pre compressed comcast HITS® (Headend In The Sky) system or feed in channel on there own like dish and direct do?

Seemingly like everything Google does these days, this is another half-hearted effort which sucks because I would really love to see someone stick it to the telco/cable dualopoly, especially now that Verizon has a back-room handshake deal not to compete with the cable companies for wireline and the cable companies won't start their own wireless network (look it up - VZW is buying spectrum from the cable co's and has terminated all further FIOS expansio, right about the time their old telco/infrastructure CEO retired and their new MBA CEO took over). We also have a bunch of republican state governments (sorry - so far it's 100% republican) that have made it illegal for city governments to deploy fiber, even if they sell access to third-party ISPs and don't run one themselves)

Anyway, Google is only going to roll out fiber to neighborhoods where at least 10% of the potential customers sign up in advance, not to the entire city. I could totally understand running your fiber backbone rings then waiting to extend it into individual neighborhoods until people sign up - limit your capex for deployment - but this seems a bit insane.

I also wish Apple/MS/et al would go after the market... it is obvious that the owners of legacy pipes intend to install toll roads on all internet access and have all made back-room handshake deals not to compete with each other. With billions in cash in the bank there is no reason the tech giants couldn't start an open-access internet utility to string fiber (just to the dense cities) to homes and businesses... Imagine Microsoft, Google, Apple, Netflix, Amazon, et al throwing their weight behind OpenInternetCo and designating the top 50 metro markets in the US (which would cover a huge percentage of the population) to receive cheap gigabit internet. Once the network starts building up you can run your CDNs on it and avoid interconnect/peering fees. Over time more and more of the traffic can stay inside OpenInternetCo's network.

If they don't jump on some sort of bandwagon soon (deploying fiber, $$millions$$ on lobbying, etc) they will find their internet-based services useless as the gatekeepers ratchet down bandwidth caps and try their hardest to soak up all the profits. We are also destined to see more and more "our video service doesn't count against your cap, but Netflix/iTunes/Google Play sure does! Oh and your cap is being 'enhanced' to a lower and $5 cheaper tier this month but the upper tier will cost $40 more"

The hilarious thing is that people often use the density/rural argument to explain why that's impossible in the US** but Verizon's own FIOS numbers prove that is BS. Once you stop investing in copper upkeep, deploying fiber is a relatively cheap operation. Verizon says they spent 20 billion to deploy fiber across half their footprint, but if you look at capex+upkeep on copper you realize a huge chunk of that fiber cost was offset! Even if we assume 20 billion, then extrapolate from there OpenInternetCo could cover the top 50 metro areas for less than 100 billion, the amount of money that just Apple has as cash in the bank. Presumably they'd kick in cash and bring on investors so I would guestimate 25-50 billion from all the tech giants combined would be enough. If I were them, I'd buy Sprint to get access to a cellular provider to ensure fair competition in that space but also to get access to their Tier-1 backbone and cross-country fiber network. Also add in someone like Frontier or Embarq/Century and you have an existing (and profitable) base to build from. You could eventually roll fiber to less dense markets and cover 80-90% of the US, and turn a profit.

**This argument also doesn't account for places like Dallas, TX that is plenty dense enough (and certainly in the city core) to support fiber deployments - the suburbs have it at far less density but that's because the suburbs were part of the initial FIOS deployment but the city proper is ATT territory and ATT isn't going to divert *any* CxO bonuses to infrastructure under any circumstances.

Everything you said was correct, though you missed a couple of things.

One, Google is already a backbone provider, so they don't need to buy Sprint. They bought dark fiber runs years ago and set up their own backbone so they would qualify for free peering agreements so they don't have to pay transit for Youtube. Paying the existing backbones for transit would have bankrupted them years ago, so they took steps.

I upgraded to a new fiber service in town 6 months ago with 24 Mbps up/down. I can't say more than that would be at all useful without the ability to run servers. You'd have to have a house full of teenagers torrenting like a ship full of pirates to stress that kind of a pipe.

Yes, you, Comcast, Rogers, AT&T, Verizon, and every other shitty ISP on the planet. For years now, you've slowly increased the cost of internet access while the speeds have remained largely unchanged for consumers (over 5 years ago, I had a 20Mbps connection for $40/month, now the same connection is almost $70/month). You haven't taken that money and improved the infrastructure, you've just been cashing in big time. I have a gig router with N wireless and cat 5e cables with gigabit nics, and have for nearing a decade. My hardware has been screaming for you to saturate it with bits, yet all you've done is force us to pay more money because you own monopolies (municipality cable, the "last mile" if you will, the telco lines, etc).

This is refreshing. Even though it's hard to identify "privacy, anonymity, and trust" with Google, they're still over 9000x better than any of these other guys. It's nice seeing what a company that isn't a big ISP with hundreds of millions in PURE NET REVENUE pouring in for ZERO WORK AT ALL can do. This really demonstrates what the outcome of spending money on infrastructure is. We have a point of reference now. Look at Google, now look at your ISP. Two orders of magnitude improvement. Two. WTF. This is putting KS on the map with the likes of EU countries and Japan in terms of internet capabilities. And what's more, the cable service is over IP, on top of a Gbps connection. The last time I checked cable prices here, Comcast wanted $89.99 for basic + a few decent channels for digital. For all the good stuff, it's like $139.99, and that's NOT including the internet connection. They'll let you bundle that with a basic 5Mbps for only $39.99 more per month! You're looking at > $200 for a connection > 20Mbps and a decent cable setup.

I really hope Google puts these jokers out of business. All of them. It's time for a revolution from the status quo.

Got a letter just this morninâ(TM) it was emailed from Mountain ViewIt was PDF'd and neatly written offerinâ(TM) me this better jobBetter job at higher wages, expenses paid and an iPhoneBut Iâ(TM)m on fiber here locally and I canâ(TM)t quit, Iâ(TM)m a star

Hah-ha I come on webcam grinnin,â(TM) wearinâ(TM) goggles and a hatItâ(TM)s a web show and Iâ(TM)m a hero of the Internet setIâ(TM)m the number one attraction in every Facebook profileIâ(TM)m the king

Those prices could be competitive, depending on what's being offered. $120 for TV+internet - if it's comparable to Direct TV I'd hop all over it.

What I really want is a good competitor to bring some pain to the existing providers who overcharge, underserve, and have no incentive to lower prices. And that includes content makers like Viacom. I hope Google succeeds.

No, it's not comparable to DirecTV. Most of your DirecTV bill goes to the content providers, not DirecTV.

So with this being only $50 for the TV part you'll get fewer channels. It won't be DirecTV's selection, but it might still be worth $50. Heck I know a lot of people who would rather have fewer channels and only pay $50.

Did you look at Dish TVs hundeds of channels? It's about 1/3rd audio-only "channels", and about 1/4 free-to-air channels (religious and home shopping).

For $50/month, expect to get about $50/month worth of channels, nothing more. Most of the money is going to the content providers so Google's ability to deliver more value for money for TV channels is limited.

Google isn't magic.

And Dish doesn't even have a $35/month pack. Their DishFamily is $25/mo, their Top 120 is $45/mo and it only gets higher from there.

Who cares? Most of the DirectTV channels are complete crap anyway. When I had directTv, I only watched twelve channels to begin with. DirectTV literally has thousands of channels. Thousands. Complete with duplicates of exactly the same channel in different time zones, tens of religious channels that my hellbound self will never have any interest in, and foreign language channels that I can't watch because they don't have subtitles. I'm not concerned so much about the number of channels as much as I am about

Yeah, but then factor in the bandwidth caps you have with your current provider, and the fact that Google wants "bandwidth to be like water." With no caps. I don't know about you, but I go over my cap with AT&T every month. Just the reality of life with a media hungry spouse, and a two year old.

They do. But a tornado bad enough to knock out the fiber will knock out the power long before (and the phone lines, since they are being run on the same poles). The power is, for residential customers, the bigger issue (not much point in gigabit Internet if your computer, modem, and WiFi are all down as well).

They're not burying the cables? Is wind not a problem out there? I thought they had tornadoes...

Not so much in the city, especially downtown KC. You do get a fair amount of straightline winds coming out of Kansas, but again, the large footprint of KC suburbs help defray the winds significantly before they hit the city proper.

Cities tend to deter tornadoes - all the buildings shape the wind. Also, burying is many times more expensive than stringing it - you can replace it a number of times before you approach the cost of burying it once.

They're not burying the cables? Is wind not a problem out there? I thought they had tornadoes...

Kansas City resident here... and a fairly old one to boot.

Tornadoes happen, but each tornado affects a relatively small area. I was a tornado spotter in my youth (yes, we actually train volunteers to do this in "Tornado Alley"), and I've only seen three tornadoes in my life, despite actively looking for them when conditions are favorable to their formation. This is why there are plenty of 100+ year old homes in the area... the likelihood of a tornado hitting a specific location in any given year is very low.

Kansas City itself is somewhat protected by the "urban heat bubble" effect - the Kansas City metropolitan area is a bit more prone to heat lightning, but less prone to tornadoes than the more rural surrounding areas.

As for just plain old wind... lines on poles and the poles themselves easily handle the fairly routine wind gusts of up to 35mph. Storms might have 45mph winds, which usually is also fine. On rare occasions wind speeds are higher than that, like last week's storms to the north of Kansas City that had 90mph winds... those storms will knock out wire-on-pole services to neighborhoods, but having your internet service disrupted for a few days isn't much of a problem since more than likely your power would be out as well for the same period of time.

No only if they would string up temp lines in the after math while they dig a new trench, but then the housing contractors will just dig it back up

Don't worry, The trench guys will get 'em back when they nick someone's buried gas line and blow up a house or apartment building. They'll be using the same bad utility maps as the builders, after all.